Architecture For Spain S Recovered Democracy

Historical studies on the involvement of architecture in twentieth-century politics have overlooked its contribution to building Spain’s democracy. This pioneering book seeks to fill that void. Between the late 1970s and early 1990s, Spain founded representative institutions, launched its welfare state, and devolved autonomy to its regions. The study brings forth the architectural incarnation of that threefold program as it deployed in the Valencian Country, a Catalan-speaking region on Spain’s Mediterranean shores. There, social democratic authorities mobilized architects, planners, and graphic artists to devise a newly open public sphere and to recover a local identity that Franco’s dictatorship had repressed for decades. The research follows the impetus of reform and its contradictions through urban projects, designs for cultural amenities, and the renovation of governmental and professional bodies. Architecture for Spain’s Recovered Democracy contributes to current debates on nationalism and the arts, the environments of democratic socialism, and postmodernism and neoliberalism. As a result, it widens our understanding of how peripheral regions may yield egalitarian architectures of resistance. This book is written for students and researchers in architecture and planning, art history, spatial politics, and Hispanic studies, as well as for a general readership interested in inclusive politics in the built environment.

This stimulating book explores theories, conceptual frameworks, and cultural approaches with the purpose of uncovering a cross-cultural understanding of landscape democracy, a concept at the intersection of landscape, democracy and spatial justice. The authors of Defining Landscape Democracy address a number of questions that are critical to the contemporary discourse on the right to landscape: Why is democracy relevant to landscape? How do we democratise landscape? How might we achieve landscape and spatial justice?

This book addresses the need for a more democratic architecture for the European welfare state by promoting citizen participation, the third sector and co-production of welfare services.

This open access volume analyses the development of democracy at different levels of governance (from local to global). The Basque search for an institutional and democratic model that adapts to its social needs and solves its problems offers an interesting perspective for analyzing the way in which democracy is seeking new forms of materialization from the local to the global. The volume is divided into four parts. The chapters in Part I analyze the tensions between the neoliberal vision of democracy and the voices contesting it, with projections at different levels of government. The chapters in Part II focus on the emerging framework and scales of Western democracy. The chapters in Part III present new forms of citizen participation, paying special - though not exclusive - attention to new practical strategies for Basque society. The volume concludes with a block of chapters on the relevance of reviewing the methodological and epistemological frameworks from which knowledge about democracy and mechanisms of citizen participation is generated (Part IV). By delving deeper into the idea and practice of democratic governance, this volume will be of interest to researchers and students from all disciplines of politics, international relations, sociology and law.

Vols. 1-3, 5-8 contain the political and literary portions; v. 4 the historical register department, of the numbers published from Oct. 1837 to Dec. 1840.